1. Technical Field
The inventive concept relates to an electronic design automation apparatus that may be easily used or accurately produce designs, and an electronic design automation method.
2. Discussion of Related Art
An integrated circuit is a set of electronic circuits on one small plate (“chip”) of semiconductor material. Integrated circuits can be highly integrated or have a very small size. Accordingly, it can be difficult to design an integrated circuit. Electronic Design Automation (EDA) is a category of software tools for designing electronic system such as printed circuit boards and integrated circuit. Design Rule Checking is the area of EDA that determines whether the physical layout of a particular chip satisfies a series of recommended parameters called Design Rules, which may stored in a rule file. Optical rule checking is used to predict the failure of wafer shapes due to process proximity effects. When the size of the integrated circuits are very small (e.g., 20 nm or below), the rule file coded in an EDA tool language used for a design rule check (DRC) or an optical rule check (ORC) may have thousands of lines. Accordingly, code errors may easily occur, and thus, it is highly likely that a product manufactured using the rule file is defective due to the code errors.